Right now, our coding style requires that both the virtual and override keywords to be specified for overridden virtual functions. A few things have changed since we decided that a number of years ago:
1. The override and final keywords are now available on all of the compilers that we build with, and we have stopped supporting compilers that do not support these features. 2. We have very recently gained the ability to run clang-based mass source code transformations over our code that would let us enforce the coding style [1]. I would like to propose a change to our coding style, and run a mass transformation over our code in order to enforce it. I think we should change it to require the usage of exactly one of these keywords per *overridden* function: virtual, override, and final. Here are the advantages: * It is a more succinct, as |virtual void foo() override;| doesn't convey more information than |void foo() override;|. * It can be easily enforced using clang-tidy across the entire code base. * It makes it easier to determine what kind of function you are looking at by just looking at its declaration. |virtual void foo();| means a virtual function that is not overridden, |void foo() override;| means an overridden virtual function, and |void foo() final;| means an overridden virtual function that cannot be further overridden. * It allows us to be in sync with the Google C++ Style on this issue [2]. * It will allow us to remove NS_IMETHODIMP, and use NS_IMETHOD instead. Please let me know what you think! [1] Facilitated by bug 904572. Also see bug 1158776 for my first attempt at this. [2] http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.html#Inheritance Cheers, -- Ehsan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
